Begin the Feeling and Start the Falling
by TheeMizKitty
Summary: He doesn't really remember how to feel, but that has to change. There is only one person who makes him feel anymore and in this moment everything begins to change. H/D


**Begin the Feeling and Start the Falling**

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter and related characters and/or franchises.

A/N: Wrote this all in one night! Of course, the first couple of paragraphs have been on my computer for _ages _and I just had to get rid of it. It was mocking me, I swear!

* * *

It started out simple enough, over something that shouldn't have bothered them in the first place. From the very beginning there had always been some big event separating them, far greater than their names held.

Maybe it was the war; maybe it was fate.

Or maybe it was all just the deceiving nature of one's own heart.

It rests in the chest, just beneath his sternum, but he ignores it. Over the years of darkness and fear he's gotten used to doing that. Heartless, soulless, a despondent pawn to be used at his master's bidding and for his father's hopes, Draco Malfoy has nothing left inside of him, not even the will to live. Just endless days stretched on into serving a madman and suffering, silently suffering, from the pain of fear which is as corroding as acid to his insides.

He can feel nothing anymore, and he prefers it that way.

He knows nothing and it is for the best.

He has no heart and only one person has ever made it have the semblance of life again.

And in that life, he always thinks that his heart reacts in hatred. How could it not considering who he is and who Harry Potter is? There is always that hate, a cold, clammy fist that wraps around the charred remains of his heart and _squeezes _what little is left of him. It is like a jumpstart, like a defibrillator sending something coursing through his veins as soon as he lays eyes on him, even from across the room and through the hoards of darkness.

He chokes on his own breath as it seems to start again, acrid air curling into his nostrils and searing that back of his throat like bile. He wants to punch something and he wants to cry; he wants to throw up and he wants to sleep and maybe just maybe never open his eyes again. Only in his dreams.

There are jets of color that never seem to stop, harsh words spewing from thin lips eternally twisted and marred with the tar of evil that hangs from every drop of air within the room. Harry Potter is the only one that can make it rain down and crash into him and break him apart, limb by limb.

And it is only a matter of time, a matter of days and hours and minutes and fucking seconds until it happens, until inevitably they are alone, hands wrapped tight around wand slick with sweat and blood. Potter's eyes are the killing curse on him, and he is petrified, just petrified, even as his body moves, even as his wand dances out hexes and he is the perfect puppet to stop Potter, just to stop him, when everything else inside is screaming, burning, twisting—

"_Malfoy-!"_

There is something somewhere and it sounds large, the belly of the beast rumbling and the agony of the damned calling as he is moved, shoved, destroyed and falling and , for just a moment, feels a heartbeat so much like his own underneath his hand. Two words and it would no longer exist. Two words and maybe everything would be alright and he could take off the blindfold and rip off the flesh of his left arm, the left side of sin, and there would be something pure and untouched underneath.

But the heartbeat is fast and the eyes are so close to his own and he knows he is the only one to ever be this close to the killing curse and live as his protection is ripped from his right hand and there is something in his side, just in between the curves of his ribs. He feels it touch his heart, maybe, for just a moment and then there is another flash of green again—_Potter's eyes, always Potter's eyes—_before he makes himself see the darkness of his eyelids, bursting with little colors that could be suppressed tears.

He hears voices. He hears anger.

But inside his head he can hear nothing at all, but the sound of his family's name cracking, his mother's anguished howls and his father's tinny grunts of pain. The sound of glass shattering, the implosion of everything that he ever was lost in the rubble, in the ridges of the tiles beneath him.

Arms grab him and he doesn't open his eyes. He doesn't care. If he can't see then he can't be blamed. Stumbling along, chaos all around, a calloused hand catches his. He doesn't know whose hand it is and he should let go but he doesn't, he doesn't want to be lost and alone anymore and the skin on his—with the skin on his, this rough skin and tight grip, there is blissful silence in his head.

For a long moment, it will have to be enough.

* * *

There is anger in a familiar voice. There is reason in another. And in the final voice there is….nothing. There is just something flat, almost dead, that he thinks that maybe he can relate to. He wants to hear that voice talk more. The hand in his has not let him go.

"Merlin's fucking tit, so you bring him _here?_ _Him_? He's a fucking death eater, in case you've fucking forgotten!"

"Ron just calm down, please, and just listen—"

"He didn't want to do it. He wasn't going to do it. You should have seen him."

"He was just hesitating in killing you because he's nothing but a _coward _Harry, a slimy, disgusting—"

"Don't talk about him like that when he's right here!"

"Oh stuff it Mione, Harry bloody knows it's true and I'm sure even the fucking death eater knows! Don't you know, Malfoy?"

He won't open his eyes because he doesn't think he can anymore. He is so tired. His tongue is dry and his lips are broken.

"Well we can't just toss him out in the snow now; he's with us and he's going to have to stay with us."

"This wouldn't have had to happen if you hadn't tried to be a fucking hero all the fucking time and—"

"Ron!"

There is a tense silence, Draco thinks. He thinks it is a tense silence but he doesn't really know because he isn't a part of it, a part of these three people's lives, least of all Potter's.

He follows compliantly when the hand in his tugs him to the right and he hears a door snap behind him. The silence persists. The hand leaves him and the whimper gets caught and destroyed somewhere between his lungs. There is some shuffling, a single weary sigh anyone could have missed but Draco, who finds his entire senses spinning around the other boy in the room. He knows it is Potter; it is never anyone but Potter.

Potter's flat voice speaks to him again after a long drawn out moment in which Draco feels eyes on him like knives impaling into his vulnerable, naked flesh. "You can open your eyes you know. I'm not going to hurt you."

And the thing is, Draco knows that. He knows that Potter, self righteous and heroic Harry Potter would never hurt him, no matter what he's done and what he is. He almost wants to tell Potter that that isn't it, that that isn't the reason for his eyes being closed, barring him inside his own darkness. He wants to tell him that the tears will start to fall if he even dares to open them a tiny bit, that his eyes tell far too much than even his tattered soul will want to admit.

He stays silent. His eyes stay closed. Draco is a coward and he would not admit to anything more or anything less.

Potter sighs. Potter shifts. Potter keeps staring at him.

For a single moment Draco wonders what he sees. Does he still see an enemy, someone to take down and be weary of, because even though his wand is gone his will is not?

Or does he see a coward, a broken boy who has seen too much but not done enough and let everything in his life fall?

"You can't kill me," Potter says at length and there it is, the truth, held up to the light and scrutinized as the ugly thing that it was. Draco flinches violently without meaning to and this time, maybe he thinks, the whimper does escape through his raw throat.

Potter steps closer; the air grows thicker. Draco feels wood against his back, feels the knob of his escape burning through his hipbone. He can run if he wanted, but how far would he get? But Draco is so very tired of running, and so very used to just dealing with what is happening to him.

"I don't want to hurt you," Potter says. "I just want to know."

Know what? There is nothing to know, because everything there had been to know was back at the Manor in the bodies strewn like broken puppets across the white linoleum floors.

But then, that's not what Potter means. Between them it is the last thing he means, and this Draco knows. Between them it had never been about the casualties or the war, but the charge between them that seemed to writhe like it had a single life of its own.

It is called hate, they used to think. It has to be hate, Draco likes to think.

It's not, Potter knows. It's something else, the same but not really, not quite.

Because Draco couldn't kill Potter, even with the weight of life on his very back. Because Draco isn't even looking at Potter now, when there is nothing and everything to lose in the span of a single look.

There is a long breath and Draco doesn't know whose it is, really, or what it means but it is there, and something inside of him starts to slip, some dark thing that has been clogging up his insides that has been loosened by bloody Potter because it's always been Potter, especially when he doesn't want it to be.

He shouldn't talk and he shouldn't even be thinking about speaking but his mouth is opening and air is rushing out in sounds, jumbled and mixed but still _there _Merlin, still there.

"I couldn't do it, I just couldn't do it! And I let everyone down, didn't I? I let my family down and for what? So that you can live and taunt me and just try to actually be civil to me? So that you can try to get information out of me?"

His eyes open and he sees Potter's face set in stone. "Information out of me?" he repeats because it is the only thing that seems to make sense here, at this impasse. "What do you want to know? How much I've seen? How many people have died? How many of your friends I've killed?"

Something in Potter's face twitches for a moment, just a moment, before it is gone and Draco is staring at cool indifference again. It is a look he can deal with; it is a look he can't understand. "That's not what I want to know at all, actually."

Draco wants to scream. Draco wants to snarl. Draco wants to cry. But what Draco does end up doing is just staring at him, at the boy who has ruined everything for him just by existing, the boy he couldn't—the boy he _can't_—kill. Stare and wait for what is coming, if anything is coming at all because Potter's just staring right back at him, another moment for the silence to fester in.

_What is this I don't I can't I don't know staring at me like that like I'm staring at you and my throat is sore and my mouth and cracked and my heart is dead but here you are thinking that it might have a chance that I might have a chance and the hope is crawling just beneath the surface and Merlin help me I want what I can't have and I can't have what I want and he's staring at me and I'm staring at him and—_

Maybe it was the war; maybe it was just fate.

Or maybe it was everything or nothing but two lonely boys trying to find something in this time of grief, something constant in a world that was becoming slippery in blood.

The reason didn't matter when Potter leaned forward and there were hot lips and not enough air to breathe. Draco is sobbing into Potter's mouth and Potter doesn't even pause in his ruthless devouring of Draco's mouth.

Perhaps he knows he deserves it, deserves the sheer ruthlessness of the assault after everything he's done and everything, so many things, which have always been between them. Potter can't afford to be gentle and Draco can't afford to show weakness and so it goes like this, like Potter pushing him against the wall and clawing at his clothes like the lion his house stood for, all teeth and growls as he grinds into Draco, hard muscle and dizzying feelings and there is vertigo, stumbling bodies into one as Draco finds something inside of him, something he thought long dead, responding to this, this violence that is so new to him in its design that he feels he must know more, must know the shape of Potter's biceps and the taste of sweat in the dip of his collarbone.

It is a feeding frenzy. It is a war within a war, a war within the bedroom as the bed is at his back and Potter is a dark hazy figure above him and buttons are ripped and dignity is sacrificed not for the greater good, not this time, but for something more primal.

Somewhere between the kisses that are more like bites and the hands that are gripping into supple flesh, he thinks he hears Potter speaking to him.

"_Malfoy—You have no idea—You taste like—You are—"_

But Draco doesn't want to hear it so he grabs the hardened flesh of his enemy, listens to the dark hiss that winds around him like an invisible serpent so like the one on his arm but so much more delicious as Potter pins him down and they are rutting and Draco's mind becomes one large haze of green and silver and sweat and breath, just breath to breathe with.

He is opening up and being filled and there are feelings running through the corpse he had thought his body had become and oh god right there, right here, just like that he is breaking apart limb by limb in Potter's grip, to be reassembled are not he doesn't care about not when he is seeing colors he didn't think existed anymore and Potter is trying to suck out his very soul from his mouth and merlin, yes, he'd give it willingly wouldn't he?

The deception that had been for so long buried in Draco's heart like a poisonous vine, the root of the evil apple, started to wither as Potter collapsed on him, held him tight even after it was all done and there was a lovely hot mess between them.

Draco thought he knew what would happen after that. He waited for Potter to start to recoil in disgust, just like all the others, waited for him to leave Draco used and forgotten in this room, a prisoner for him to take advantage of.

But Potter is a hero, and for so long now Draco had forgotten that and seen him as just the enemy because that was all he could have been. But after this, with Potter's weight on top of him and his breath on his neck—

When Potter starts to pull away from him, Draco closes his eyes. Draco turns away. He prepares for the inevitable rejection, prepares for everything but what happens, the light touch of hot fingertips skating over his cheek, down his lips, over his heart. He shivers. He grows so still that even his heart seems to stop. He doesn't open his eyes, not yet, not now, even as soft lips replace those fingers and Potter's weight is still pinning him down.

_He's not leaving, not yet, not now, what is this I don't, I can't, I want—_

"Draco… Draco why won't you look at me?"

He inhales and it is ragged. "I'm afraid to see you," he admits without really meaning to, without even knowing that he is speaking before there is breath on his lips and pressure and it is a kiss, a light kiss that is more than a brush than anything but Draco feels it all the way down to his toes, in the deepest reaches of his heart that is starting to burn.

And for a moment he can't help but hate it, hate this feeling and the boy that is casually causing it as though he doesn't understand what he is doing, not at all, and somewhere in the passion Draco wonders when he forgot to hate this boy, this messy haired idiot who had started the destruction of his family. He forgets a lot of things lately. He doesn't yet know if it is a good thing or a bad thing.

"Get off of me," he whispers, "Please get off of me."

The lips leave his and there is a pause, tense, worried, and Draco can feel those eyes scanning his face so pinched in with pain.

"Malfoy…?"

There it is, the transformation back to being _Malfoy _that he knew had been coming and yet still, still even with knowing it hurt a little, a lot, to hear it, that reminder that he was _Malfoy _and this was _Potter _and what they had just done was so wrong, so wrong even though it had felt so good and Draco can still feel his insides trembling from the utter release it had brought to him for just a moment, yes, a moment.

And now that moment is over and Potter had to move, had to leave his prisoner and his _enemy _to rot within this little room with a bed and no windows and nothing but his thoughts and his shame and his heart, the rotten thing that dared to still beat.

That is the way it was to be, in Draco's mind. But Potter's mind has always been different, perhaps a perfect parallel to his own.

"What is it?" Potter asks him, and his voice is earnest in a way that is shouldn't be. Draco flinches. Potter's arms, placed on either side of him, seem to tighten. Trapped. But Draco is used to this feeling, if not this circumstance.

"You need to just leave me," he manages to harshly whisper, turning his face away from Potter's hot breath, Potter's tempting warmth. "You need to go back to your friends. This…whatever it was…never happened."

"What do you mean it never happened?" Potter asks, and Draco doesn't want to recognize the emotion in his voice because in his mind it has to be emotionless, removed, and not full of the bewilderment it really does contain. "I wanted it to happen."

Draco wants to scream again. "Well I didn't."

The weight of Potter on top of him grows heavier. A threat, it seems that Draco refuses to respond to. "Yes, you did. I heard you call my name. I heard you moan."

Shame is not a foreign emotion to him, not anymore, not after everything he's had to do to get here, in this unholy circle of his enemies arms. He wants to punch Potter for making him feel it again. Instead he just withdraws further into himself, to the place he's built out of the tattered remains of happier times.

Potter, the bastard, follows him there.

"You wanted it as much as I did, Malfoy, I _felt _it."

"It shouldn't have happened. It was a moment, Potter, and now it's passed. Let me go."

"No, I don't think I will."

"_Let me go."_

But then Potter is kissing him again, in that violent way that seems to break Draco's jaw and tear apart his lips until he is bleeding, pleading and panting as Potter tears him apart from the inside with a tongue in his mouth and a hand over his heart and this is it, Draco thinks, this is finally the end. If there is a heaven it might be here; if there is a hell, it might be here too.

And if Potter, his enemy, the boy kissing his neck, his wrist, his hip, notices the tears that streak from his closed eyes, he doesn't say anything. After he'll kiss them away until they are replaced by others and more and more and more and Potter takes them all.

He takes them all and doesn't let any of them go.

* * *

"What are you doing with him?"

"Nothing."

"Don't lie to me, Harry. I know what's happening, and it shouldn't be happening. You know what he is."

"And he knows what I am, too. I don't see the problem."

"He could kill you."

"He hasn't yet. He didn't before."

"He tried."

"But he didn't. He….couldn't."

"I…don't understand. Why him Harry? Why Malfoy?"

"I don't know Mione. I really don't know."

"It can't continue."

"Says who?"

"He's wanted by the Order."

"I won't let them have him."

"Why are you protecting him?"

"Because he's not a murderer; he's not like the others. He doesn't belong in Azkaban."

"But he belongs in your bed?"

"He belongs wherever I am."

"Why?"

"He's the only thing that makes me feel…anything anymore. I can't explain it Hermione but when I'm around him, I feel…alive again, almost. I feel the old hate for him inside of me and I let it control me and…"

"Are you sure it's just hate? You don't do…_that_ with someone you hate."

"No. No you don't, do you? But we've always been different."

_Different. _From his room Draco mouths the words into his pillow, wet with sweat from a recent nightmare. _Different_. He doesn't know if he likes the way it sounds, the things Potter has said. He doesn't know that he likes it because beneath his sternum the thing inside of him feels the same way.

* * *

He thinks about his family sometimes, when Potter is asleep behind him and the room is dark with shadows. He thinks about his family and where they are, what they're doing, if they're even alive to think of them too. He shouldn't be here. He shouldn't be a prisoner but be with them, suffering with them and helping them.

_You are our last chance Draco_, his father had said. _You are the one that has to end this. _

But Draco hadn't ended it, not at all, because the killing curse had hit him first in the form of green eyes and rough lips. Draco had let his family down. He had let his family down and he can't feel anything but the heat of Potter at his back and the line of bite marks on his neck and the way his heart, which should have been breaking in fear, in hate, was a thing that couldn't seem to stop racing and seemed swollen, with disease or something else Draco doesn't want to know.

_What am I doing? _

Potter is sitting next to him in bed, close enough to touch him but not touching him yet, not quite. They are both staring at the wall. They are both just staring and seeing nothing but each other.

_What is he doing?_

Potter shifts then, just slightly, and their arms brush, electricity and a steady burn that takes over Draco's mind little by little. Warmth and a magnetic pull that shouldn't exist but does, it really does as Potter leans closer to him, smelling of sweat and salt and their entire sides are touching, and Draco finds impossibly, inconceivably, that he can breathe a little easier now.

_What are they doing?_

* * *

Time passes, Draco thinks. Time passes but nothing really changes, and it is always just him alone in the room during the day and at night in the company of Potter. Potter, who doesn't say anything to him and just kisses him, just undresses him with rough hands that are always so steady when every time feels like a first for Draco, when every touch still makes him dizzy and the kisses threaten to steal all his thoughts.

Some nights he really does want to say something but he doesn't know what. He doesn't understand what this is between them but he's okay with it, and maybe that's enough. He can't believe that it is happening, sometimes, because he never forgets, even in the throes of passion that leaves him sobbing, that this is _Harry Potter _touching him, taking him, bringing him to the brink and pulling him back all over again.

He should be disgusted by it, but he can't be, not when what Potter is making him feel feels so good compared to all the years of feeling nothing but bad, and Draco wonders if in Potter's kisses and in his arms and even in his silence he has found some semblance of happiness that is as fragile as his body feels underneath of Potter's own.

It is delicate, this thing between them. It is breakable. It can't last.

But that doesn't stop his happiness from blooming anyway, like an apple falling from a tree that will too soon meet the ground. But not now, not yet, as Potter kisses him again and his lips are swollen and his eyes are slanted.

He is starting to keep his eyes open. To see the sweat on Potter's brow. To see the way his chest heaves. To see the things Draco can't fathom that he is making the soon-to-be hero of the wizarding world feel.

The only thing Potter ever says is his name. At first it is _Malfoy. _

But then—

But then—

_Draco—_

* * *

There is an end, of course. Draco had known from the very beginning that there would be an end, being who they both are. He just never expected it to be so painful.

"You need to leave," Potter tells him one night when they are curled around each other in way that should be disturbing in how well they fit together. Draco allows himself a single, long breath. He doesn't ask why, he doesn't need to, but Potter, damn him, continues anyway.

"It's not safe here anymore. I think that….the Death Eaters know where this place is. I have to leave. I have to. You do to."

Draco doesn't shift away from him. Draco doesn't say anything. Draco just lays there and wonders how this started and why this started and why it had to even end. Why there is always pain for him. Why he has to be the one who brings it upon himself. Why he hasn't tried to leave at all, sooner, before Potter got tired of him.

"Okay," is all he says because really there is nothing else that can possibly be said here, at this moment. Or maybe there is just too much to possibly say.

But it doesn't matter because Draco forces his eyes closed, as he's done so many times before and just lies there, against Potter and wonders in vain if the other boy is really sleeping too or just pretending like him to avoid it all.

When daylight breaks somewhere and Potter rolls away from him Draco's hands become fists, his body tenses. But he keeps his eyes closed. He doesn't watch Potter leave. He doesn't try to feel the fleeting touch against his spine, a goodbye touch maybe, an apologetic touch maybe, before the door clicks shut and he can open his eyes and stare at the empty spaces all around him.

When he gets up later, alone and in an empty little house in the middle of nowhere, he finds his wand waiting for him just outside the bedroom door. He doesn't look at it. He leaves it there on the floor and steps around it, doesn't look around just walks to the front door. Opens it. Closes it. Is gone like everything else, at least for now.

At least for now.

* * *

There is something greater than both of them, and the things that have happened between them. Draco had forgotten about the world but now he saw it again, saw the killings and the curses and his parent's taunt, gaunt faces in the light of killing curses.

There is a war and there are sides and Draco tries to remember his side, he really does, but the war, greater than what it was that happened between him and Potter, doesn't seem that important to him, not anymore.

It doesn't seem important when he can still taste Potter on his lips or when his pale skin still bears dark fingerprints and teeth marks that tells a story within this war, of a better time and a better place where Draco remembered that he still has a heart and it is still beating and it isn't just something horrible but really it can be something wonderful, maybe, in the right circumstances.

Of course in this muddy battleground, a madman cackling among the dead, are never the right circumstances. There is fear and it twists inside of him and it surprises him, surprises him in the will it is giving him to stay alive and fight on.

Some nights, as he sleeps in the shadows of fear and the smell of death, he dreams of Potter. He wonders if he dreams of him too, or even thinks about him. If he even cares that Draco is still alive and fighting to survive each and every day simply because he's not ready to forget the things that had happened, and what they shouldn't have meant to him and what they still mean to him, weeks later on the other side of the war that seems to have no stopping point.

But he wants it to end. He wants it to end in the way everyone secretly hopes, in the way all the stories end where good conquers evil and then there is peace, just peace and maybe a chance of a new life for him. He doesn't know what that new life will be like but he likes to dream sometimes, in the states of exhaustion his fears put him in, that it will involve familiar heat at his back and green eyes. He wants it to involve hate. He wants it to involve love. He wants it to involve that person in the middle that he doesn't name anymore, in the frigid palace of his family name where angels and heroes and good all seem to go to die.

The war is great; the war will change the wizarding world as he knows it. But something in his chest is just as great, in that space just beneath his sternum, in the phantom touches of calloused hands he still feels on his skin when he is alone and has time to just _feel_.

* * *

It happens again. Déjà vu. Fate maybe. He doesn't know and he doesn't care, so long as green eyes are watching him across a battlefield and for a second everything seems to slow down and he feels just the pounding of his heart, the sound of his own breathing loud and ragged and filling up the space all around him.

He sees him with his wand drawn, his eyes intent and there is a clenching feeling somewhere low in his gut that seems to be pulling him forward faster and faster until he is running, over bodies and spells and chaos and he doesn't falter, not once, even as his father screams his name.

He doesn't stop until clothing meets clothing and through it skin meets skin and he can see green eyes up close, shocked and staring into his own, the wand between them. He can hear Weasley and Granger through a fog gasping, screaming, can hear the hissings and ravings of the madman not far off, but nothing matters but this, this moment where he can feel the heat of the other's body again and feel hot breath cascading over the bridge of his nose and setting his skin on fire.

"_Potter—Potter—"_

The wand between them shifts and just as before Draco can feel it slide across his ribs, dig into his flesh, but that's okay. That's okay because Potter is saying his name; not _Malfoy _but _Draco _and it is glorious, for just a moment, before the stunner hits him and he is a crumpled mass on the ground, immoveable with the faintest of smiles hovering around his lips, his eyes.

The war ends with him there, on the ground, even after the hex has faded away and he just lays there and breaths. He can smell the grass. He can hear the screams of the dying, the cheers of the victorious.

He doesn't protest when they take him away, pick him up off the ground and place him in handcuffs, announce that he doesn't have a wand. He doesn't protest and he doesn't say anything, even as his father just stares at him with an empty gaze, even as Fenrir howls and scratches at his bindings, even as his mother sobs quietly into her hands.

They have lost, it seems, but Draco doesn't think so. Not when Potter, from his place among the media, among his friends, looks over them all to meet his eyes.

_He hasn't forgotten and neither will I._

Potter watches him get taken away. Draco smiles, weak but there, down at his hands curled into his lap, at the chains binding his wrists. His heart is pounding. He is not afraid.

* * *

Draco doesn't count how long it takes, but when it happens he finds he is ready. The guards lead him out of his cell without a word. They take him down a hallway, into a room that looks less like the prison that this is and take off his chains. They leave without a word but Draco isn't alone.

Potter looks horrible for being the Savior of the wizarding world. He has stubble and his eyes are red. His glasses are gone. His hair is knotted. But none of that matters when he looks up, green eyes meet his and then he is smiling and Draco is smiling back, naturally, perfectly.

"_Fancy meeting you here, Potter."_

Potter gets up, holds out his hand. Draco takes it and shakes it. Harry pulls him into his arms and then his face is in his hair and Draco can feel a heartbeat counterpoint to his own beneath the layers that separate them.

"_I can't feel anything without you," _Harry whispers against his neck, his pulse, his life. Draco winds his fingers into unruly hair, smoothes it out. It is crazy. It is lovely. This is something far greater than a war, their names, an empty bed and an empty chest.

This. This is—

"_I know."_

_Fin. _

* * *

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